ZBW project MOVING reaches the home stretch – first results from a European research project in Science 2.0

European research consortium builds a working environment for digital information and innovation management – ZBW is the coordinating re-search partner and responsible for text and data mining

Category: News, Press release

Kiel/Hamburg, 16 January 2018: After two years’ running time, another big-budget European research project, involving nine international partners from Greece, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Poland and the UK and led by the ZBW reaches the home stretch. The first public prototype has just gone live. MOVING aims to build a working environment for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of large collections of documents and data. The ZBW is the research partner for text and data mining under the direction of Professor Ansgar Scherp and also the scientific coordinator of MOVING, and contributes its expertise in the field of Science 2.0 to the project.

Scientists have to sift vast amounts of literature, research data, websites, tenders and social media, such as blog posts, to find the facts relevant to them, and all this under pressure of time. Fortunately, computer science offers many methods and algorithms to manage huge amounts of documents and data. Unfortunately, most of these can only be operated by ex-perts. In 2016, the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics decided to try to change this. Now the first public prototype of the working environment of MOVING has gone live and offers multimodal searches for literature, videos and websites. Other modules, such as the learning environment, will follow in the next fifteen months of the project’s remaining duration.

On the platform MOVING, researchers can communicate with each other, collaborate for new findings, develop and share joint resources for research. In the future they will find here tools for organising work and coordinating activities as well as extensive knowledge, media content and documentations, software and data for scientific experiments. Users themselves choose the object, collaborators or tools of their research. A strong community offers con-stant support.

“MOVING aims to bring order to the flood of information from scholarly publications, research data, websites, tenders and social media with the help of text and data mining methods,” says Ansgar Scherp, scientific coordinator of the project and professor of Knowledge Discovery at the ZBW.

MOVING is designed as a three-dimensional research project. Parallel to the digital working environment there will be a training environment for digital information and innovation man-agement and as the third dimension a community of practice, where users can consult with and support each other. Ansgar Scherp again: “We assume that digital information and inno-vation management will be as important a cultural technique as reading and writing. That is why the training component plays such a fundamental part beside the working environment.”

MOVING is the second international research project initiated by the ZBW under Professor Klaus Tochtermann which addresses Science 2.0 in the context of Horizon 2020. The first was the EU project EEXCESS which ended in 2016. With this project the ZBW continuously expands its research activities at the European level.

About MOVING – Training towards a society of data-savvy information professionals to enable open lead-ership innovation:

MOVING – Training towards a society of data-savvy information professionals to enable open leadership innovation is an interdisciplinary EU Research and Innovation Action (RIA) focussing on computer and media sciences. The project partners are based in Greece, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, Poland and the UK and encompass the following institutions beside the ZBW: Centre for Research and Technology Hellas (Greece), Technical University of Dresden (Germany), KNOW Center GmbH (Austria), Institute Jozef Stefan (Slovenia), University of Manchester (UK), GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (Germany), Progress and Business Foundation (Poland) and Ernst & Young GmbH Wirtschaftsprüfungsgesellschaft (Germany).

These partners from academia, business and research transfer aim to develop a working and training platform that on one hand enables users from academia, business and society to handle and to understand large amounts of documents and data, and on the other hand fosters the skills of researchers and users in digital information and innovation management.

The project starts in April 2016 and is funded with 3.5 million Euros for a duration of three years.